This commentary is by David Lazarovich, 27, from Stowe, who’s now a medical student in Krakow, Poland. He comes home summers, lived in South Burlington for middle and high school, and says driving into downtown Burlington “has always been a nightmare.”
With the bidding process underway, it looks like the Champlain Parkway is going to be built. The benefits of the project will be short-lived.
We have seen across the country that projects like this provide some congestion relief but are quick to reach their maximum threshold. Once completed, more people will be encouraged to get in their cars and drive into downtown Burlington and the influx of new cars will quickly congest the roads again.
If the goal is to decrease congestion, the answer is not to make more room for cars; it is to get cars off the road.
The only way to do this is to bring back and expand local passenger rail service. Besides providing service on existing tracks, a new route should be constructed from Williston to downtown Burlington. The tracks would run along I-89 North to the 189, follow 189 to Shelburne, and connect with the existing VRS tracks between Queen City Park Road and Home Ave via the Champlain Parkway corridor.
The tracks would be electrified, and serviced by tram-trains. As the name implies, tram-trains are trams that meet the safety requirements for heavy rail trains. They are increasingly becoming popular, as construction of light rail-specific tracks are not required, and they can be deployed on existing heavy rail corridors.
Because of this, the new tracks could later be extended south to Richmond, which opens the possibility of relevant regional rail to Montpelier and allows Amtrak’s Vermonter to stop in downtown Burlington (and continue to St. Albans, assuming track improvements are made between Union Station and Essex Junction).
An added benefit would be the possibility of the constructing of a bikeway from Williston to downtown Burlington parallel with the new tracks. This would be a welcome addition to Chittenden County’s bike infrastructure, as it would finally provide a direct route between the cities.
After seeing the transit solutions here in Europe (Krakow, Oslo, Copenhagen, Berlin, Brussels, etc.), I hope to convince fellow Vermonters that investing in local/regional rail is the solution for traffic congestion in the Burlington area.
As it stands, the Champlain Parkway project is a half-measure. It is the physical manifestation of “it’s good enough.” To not leave room for and build rail in the Champlain Parkway corridor would be a waste of an opportunity to make a meaningful impact in both decreasing traffic congestion and offering Vermonters an efficient, green, affordable means of transit into downtown Burlington. We need to do better.
